What is duration recording in ABA?
Duration recording is timing how long a behavior lasts - either the total time across a session or the length of each episode - used when a behavior's problem or progress lives in its length rather than its count.
Some behaviors are misdescribed by counting. A learner who tantrums once for forty minutes is not doing better than one who tantrums three times for a minute each, but a frequency measure says otherwise. When length is the clinically meaningful dimension - time engaged with a task, time out of seat, episode length of crying - duration is the right measure.
Duration is recorded from onset to offset, which makes those two definitions the whole ballgame. When does 'out of seat' begin - weight off the chair, or both feet on the floor? When does a tantrum end - first quiet moment, or a full minute calm? Ambiguity here produces observer disagreement and noisy graphs, so good duration programs define both edges explicitly.
The two reporting flavors answer different questions. Total duration - the sum across a session, often expressed as a percentage of session time - tracks overall engagement or overall disruption. Per-occurrence duration tracks whether episodes are getting shorter, which is often the first sign an intervention is working even while the count holds steady.
Mechanically, duration means running a timer alongside everything else the therapist is doing, and often several timers across a session. This is one of the places digital collection most clearly beats paper - start-stop capture with the timestamps kept - because a hand-logged guess at minutes is exactly the kind of data that quietly stops being true.
Duration pairs naturally with latency - the time from a cue to the start of the response - which uses the same stopwatch logic to answer a different question: not how long the behavior lasted, but how long it took to begin.